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The Interview
Q:
How did this all start?
A: The Beverley Owens Project has a series of restrictions and challenges that make it fun as an artist, but doesn't necessarily allow me to fulfill my artistic vision for the Sins. They will restrict size, or colour for example, so they have a cohesive show with multiple artists.
But working on this project got me interested in the sins and the way we interpret them today. Not many people can name all seven, for example. And in some cases, like pride, we have a very different interpretation, one that doesn’t invoke sin.
Q: What are the seven deadly sins?
A: Gluttony, pride, wrath, greed, sloth, lust and envy. They were created to guide humans in their spiritual quest for heaven and eternal life. Being a spiritual person, I was interested in the list not for its explanations of our "fallen" status, but rather, how the vices do speak to spiritual truths.
I think that, unique among humans, is the ability to see beauty in devastation, waste and ruin. Whether we call it the beauty of ruin or the comfort of something rustic, we all do it. Is it a result of emotional and psychological detachment? Is that detachment a requirement for human survival? Or does detachment come from our lizard brains, and it's the higher brain, the human brain, that is capable of seeing beauty despite the detachment? Or, perhaps, it is because of it?
In seeing the beauty of destruction, destruction we participate in, can we relate to it, to our actions and to ourselves? The Musing of Skulls started from these kinds of thoughts, these musings.
Q: How does Georgia O’Keefe fit into this? I know her work was influential.
A: In my opinion, the woman who found the beauty of this destruction, these deadly sins is American artist Georgia O'Keefe. She was part of the memento mori movement, looking at death and transformation without overwrought moralizing and hand wringing.
She set skulls against the landscape of her home, giving us insight into how closely she embraced the beauty of loss and death. There was nothing gruesome, nothing sensation about her skulls and bones. Her paintings portray a comfort, an embracing without tragedy. I wanted to pay a visual homage to Georgia O'Keefe, when I began the Musing of the Skulls by representing the Seven Deadly Sins with animal skulls in the desert. These painting each represent their own story of the danger, the beauty and the effect of vices. Exploring these old-fashioned vices let me understand their place within contemporary North American life. Each has a different story to tell.
Q: Let’s talk about those stories. We’ll start with Gluttony, which is defined as the over-indulgence of eating and drinking.
A: Gluttony sounds simpler than it is. It sounds personal, overeating, and that’s certainly a hot topic these days with obesity rates skyrocketing in North America. But ultimately it isn’t the glutton who suffers, it’s others. On a global scale, the more we eat the less other people eat because we use all of the resources. And it goes beyond people to animals, to the land and the water. We are water gluttons, land gluttons, air gluttons.
Q: How does this tie into the spiritual message you were talking about earlier? This is a painting of a horse skull, and North Americans don’t traditionally eat horse.
A: We are really good at metaphysical gluttony, of over-eating the animals around us not necessarily by physically eating, although we do that with many animals, but with our story telling and our myths and our everyday exploitation of animals.
Q: Can you please describe Gluttony for our listeners?
A: Gluttony is a large horse skull in greys and blues, warm and cold, sitting over a hot desert cooling as the night falls. Its empty eye socket sees what is before it, and behind it. The skeletal mouth grins, grimaces, as it surveys the barren landscape.
It represents gluttony, the over-indulgence of humanity in eating the entire world for dinner. The flesh is loosened from the horse and opened our eyes to our own sin by letting us see the familiar in a way that is unfamiliar. We all know what a horse looks like, but not many of us know a horse’s skull. Look deeply at the skull, its rotund jaw protruding like a fat man's belly, and you can see the whorls and swirls of where blood once fed flesh, and flesh once fed human myth. We honour animals by making them noble, and then smack our lips as we destroy their habitat, their lives, to fulfill our own gluttonous fantasies.
The fading daylight makes the scene bearable, for soon night will come and hide our sin, diminish it. Except we know by the inner light of the skull that it is not to be hidden again. I don’t want people to feel shame, I want them to face their place in this story. There is no shame in the beauty of this destruction, in this memento mori, and there is no shame in wanting to see it at the golden hour when the sun makes the world its most beautiful.
You can lose yourself in the open landscape and then find yourself in the intricacies of colours of the skull -- protecting you, encasing you.
Bare bones are a thing of beauty, the antithesis of gluttony, the emptiness of sin which transforms the viewer. The horse forgives your human weakness, and leaves you cleansed so you can find your own voice, your own place within gluttony. The more you accept ownership of your sins, I think the better you understand and maybe even control them.
Q: In the Pride painting, you have a deer skull and tall mountains. What’s the relation between them?
A: You stand taller when you are proud, taller and straighter and stronger. Not only do you feel like you’re standing on top of a mountain, but at some level physically you are bigger when you’re proud. We hear talk all the time about gay pride, pride in your heritage, pride in a job well done. I’m sure if you asked most people today if it is really a sin to be proud of what you have accomplished, if it was a deadly sin, they’d say no.
Look at the deer skull, its antlers proudly spanning the heavens themselves, rising over mountains and stirring up the clouds. Straight, strong and head-on, the deer skull dominates the land below. It is not content to hide in shadows but demands to be seen.
But Pride takes on a sinister look in the empty eyes and drawn out jawline. The antler tips are angled at you, the viewer, leaving you with a vague feeling of threat. Pride isn’t as harmless as we say it is. While I fully support taking your place in this world, and of course in gay and lesbian pride and in social movements of liberty, those things have been intertwined with Pride to the point of indistinguishability. Pride is for show.
Q: So we’re animals putting on a display? Like peacocks displaying their feathers?
A: Yes. Portraying yourself as bigger, stronger and taller than you are is a
defense mechanism. Pride is a defensive sin, it’s a deceptive sin when stripped of that which connects us to the familiar. Separate modern pride from social and cultural movements and you begin to see a spiritual truth, and that interests me. Without flesh to hide that truth, the anger and danger of pride is revealed. This is not Bambi’s skull. It is challenging you, threatening you, and this pride is not harmless.
Seen in the full light of day, only the earth has shadows cast on it by both clouds and skull, those things which are above the corporeal. We all know that spirituality has a traditional place in earth and sky. And yet we are drawn to this skull, to its slender lines and jutting angles, the fusion of bones echoing the crevices of the earth below. Nothing is perfectly symmetrical in the skull, nothing is perfect at all except the desire to be proud.
Follow the outline of the landscape with your eyes, visually caress the skull, the antlers, and see pride in a new way. Look at the fragility of spaces between the bones, the vastness of the sockets designed to hold big, deep, trusting eyes. You can see the frailty of that which is left when the flesh of pride is gone. You can begin to see the true beauty of pride. This is a story that you have to tell yourself, you are the one who creates the ending.
Q: The painting of Envy is a skull I don’t recognize. Is it a dog or cat?
A: It’s a fox. The fox is a perfect example of how we humans have completely embraced an animal into our daily lives even though we may never have seen one in real life. People want to look foxy, or be sly as a fox, or cunning as a fox. At various times we want fox pelts to wear, or to outfox our enemies or be crazy like a fox which we all know isn’t crazy but brilliantly deceptive. We envy the fox. But we don’t really know the fox at all, and I think we don’t really know envy.
We pretend we know envy, we know the feeling of envy, of wanting what someone else has. We even know what it’s like to want to create envy, to buy some expensive car or even a $4 coffee so people who can’t afford that luxury can envy us. But there’s an unacknowledged side of envy. That’s the desire not only to have what others have, but to take it away from the person who does have it.
Think about it. In that first instant of envy, when you look at something that someone or something has and you think to yourself “I want that,” what you’re also thinking is, “I want THAT. I don’t want something like that, I want that thing the person has, that very thing I want to take it away from you and have it to myself.”
Envy is incredibly selfish. If you begin to recognize this undercurrent you realize that envy is empty, it strips the flesh from the bone and makes it difficult to know what you’re looking at. Like a fox without the ears and nose to help us understand and recognize it, truly understanding envy is seeing the base, the bones underneath.
Q: The landscape underneath the skull is barren, and a large portion of sky is barren.
A: Right. To see the truth sometimes you can’t get caught up in the details, you have to see the bigger picture. The sky represents this duality of envy, where it’s close to the ground and partially shrouded, that’s the envy that most of us recognize. It’s what’s near us. But further away, on the other side of the skull, is the selfish side of envy. Once you see it, once you know it’s there, you can see it clearly in yourself and in others. And that’s where the real spiritual growth begins. In the foreground on the left side looking at the painting, you’ll see the land begin to rise up. There’s no vegetative growth in this landscape, but the land itself is growing, reaching up toward the skull and the spiritual truth of the selfishness of envy.
Q: Greed is a very dramatic painting. I understand that’s a camel skull. How did you come to equate greed with a camel?
A: There are two levels to this equation. The first is physical in that the camel is known to drink huge amounts of water at a time, something like 200 litres to replace water that it needs. They’re used because they don’t need water and food for great periods of time, and they’re known to work themselves to death. Camel hair is used for weaving, dung for fuel and milk to drink. Camels are eaten, their bones carved into jewellery, just about every part of a camel can be used one way or another.
But on a human level, we humans are greedy with camels. In North America, we don’t use camels that way, we use them for entertainment, for kiddy rides and petting zoos. They are transplanted to a world they don’t know, because people want to make money off them.
Q: Doesn’t that happen with lots of animals, like dogs and dog breeding?
A: Yes but that’s not the predominant use of dogs. In North America, they’re generally treated as pets. But camels aren’t pets, we have them only for fun and profit.
Camels can be unpredictable with their spitting, and downright dangerous with their kicks. I think the personality of the camel is a doppelganger for greed. It’s fun, it’s unpredictable, and it has a mean streak because greed has transformed us and thus itself. Spiritually, we are greedy people. We want more and more, we want lots, and we want it now. A camel can drink 200 litres of water a day, and if humans could take in the equivalent spiritual refreshment each day they would. We are impatient, spitting on what doesn’t immediately please us or fulfill our wants and desires. And we kick at and try to destroy anything that annoys us, anything we don’t want.
It’s one thing to give little or no value to an object, a social cause or a spirituality. But we rarely leave it like that, especially where spirituality is concerned. It isn’t enough to pray and let others pray as they would like, we seem to need to break down their spiritual efforts, to belittle or stop their method of prayer altogether.
In Greed, we have a camel skull showing its teeth, teeth that most people probably never realized a camel had. It’s revealing the potential danger of greed, that greed can bite back and do some damage. Below the skull you see clear blue skies but above the skull, where greed meets the heavens, a storm is brewing.
As a deadly sin, greed is vibrant and active, like the land beneath, and it’s clear to us what greed is, like the blue sky. But once you really begin to look at greed, at its effects on our psyches and our souls, that’s where the storm is. That’s where it becomes chaotic and powerful and dangerous. We can try to fool ourselves that we can control our greed, but unless there’s a real spiritual understanding of greed and its effects, then you’re kidding yourself. You can’t control a storm, and you can’t control greed. I think, on some level, all you can do is understand it and prepare for it, let it swirl around you knowing you’re protected.
Q: Lust is generally considered a sexual sin, why did you go with a buffalo skull?
A: I think people understand lust these days as being something related to sex, but that’s because it’s accessible. Sex is accessible. But this series of paintings investigating the seven deadly sins is meant to look both at contemporary and traditional interpretations. I think we have lust for a lot of things other than sex, but we minimize that. Television is a perfect example of where you can find people happily proclaiming that driving around looking at houses is their porn, real estate porn. Or food porn, for example. We lust after so many things these days, it’s commonplace. And there aren’t too many people who will think that something so commonplace as to describe food or decorating will say it’s a deadly sin.
But if we look at the history of lust in North America, we can see a real lust for land, for ownership and control of land. And it has been the buffalo that has paid a huge price for our land lust. We all know that there were once massive herds of buffalo, and they were hunted almost to nothingness. Their bodies would like rotting in the sun simply because it was so easy to kill them and they became devalued. We would load up boxcars full of buffalo skull just for the bounty, but after a while the skulls, the entire carcass was just left by the side of the railway tracks. We killed them not for food or money or skin, but for the lust of the kill, the lust of the land.
Q: The buffalo skull in the Lust painting is missing its lower jaw, why?
A: There is a lot about the sin of lust that goes unspoken. We were saying earlier that lust is considered sexual, and then we talked about food lust and house lust and so on. I think lust is so pervasive that its presence goes mainly unspoken.
Q: So what’s wrong with food lust or house lust? Where’s the sin?
A: Lust isn’t about desire, it’s about the uncontrollability of that desire. In the painting you see that the skull is placed within both the land and the sky. If the land represents the human plain, you see that it is rising up, engulfing and growing. It’s no longer separate from the skull, we humans are not separate from lust. We embrace it like there’s nothing wrong. And it’s filling up the space that belongs to the sky, the spiritual realm.
Q: That’s why there are storm clouds.
A: Right. There are gaps in the storm, a symbol of hope and clearing, but the swirling clouds are echoed in the swirling flow of bone in the skull. On an important level, its merging together, slowly becoming indistinguishable. Physicality, lust and spirituality are blending. It isn’t cohesive, it isn’t a union, it’s the human inability to keep separate what needs to be kept separate. In the case of lust in particular, it’s so pervasive that we’re losing sight of the real damage being done, the loss. There is silence here, part of the story is missing like the lower jawbone, and you the viewer are the one to tell that story.
Q: I saw you tweet out that koalas can sleep 22 hours a day, is that why you chose a koala bear skull for Sloth?
A: Yeah. I’m pretty sure that if people started to name the seven deadly sins, they’d forget sloth. One of the interesting aspects is that it can be interpreted in a very capitalistic way. Laziness and failure to be industrious and hard working are the bain of the capitalist economic market. Imagine a world in which humans slept 22 out of every 24 hours.
We think of koala bears as cute, furry, funky little wild animals that we can pick up and hold even if they’re wild. That’s not the truth, of course, and that’s why the koala fit so well into sloth. We pretend to know the truth about sloth, but we don’t.
Q: What do you mean?
A: I interpret sloth to represent a spiritual laziness, not an economic one. How many people spend hours a day praying or reciting spiritual incantations? Unless your economic place resides within a spiritual one, unless someone is paying you to pray, then it probably isn’t happening.
And we don’t put any emphasis on it. You can try to buy enlightenment and spirituality, but we all know it doesn’t work. And the funny thing is, we keep trying. We know the work of prayer is important, but, at some level, we don’t care. We certainly don’t care enough to pray regularly.
Q: Some people do.
A: Yes, certainly. I’m talking generalities here. In terms of sin, spiritual Sloth is forgivable for a lot of people. They forgive themselves and friends and family for not being spiritually hard working, for letting it slide. That’s why there is a division between the skull and the land. The land is a metaphor for humans, and sloth is above that, not because it isn’t a human sin but because we are so quick to forgive spiritual sloth. In fact, if you’re really prayerful and spiritual, you stand out in society. You can be ostracized, people will think you’re funny or crazy or worse.
In this painting, the sky is clouding over, and you can see a hint of a storm in the upper right corner when viewing it. The darkening sky represents the potential for being ostracized, for being considered off the mark. I remember years ago speaking to some women who were totally okay with me coming out as a lesbian, but coming out as pagan was completely different. Totally rational people suddenly wondered if I was killing babies and worshipping evil deities. There’s huge social pressure not to be spiritual, and you’re suspect if you are actively spiritual. We encourage spiritual sloth as a society, we reward it. I think people who are willing to traverse the path…
Q: As represented by the footpaths in the mountains?
A: Yes, exactly. If you’re willing to climb the spiritual mountain, to exert yourself, to work for your soul, you can reach heaven, whatever your heaven might be. But you have to recognize that there is a potential for a storm, that the stories you will have to tell may be about struggle, hard work and diligence.
Q: Wrath is a chimpanzee skull, and it’s one of the most visually aggressive paintings in the series. Why a chimp skull?
A: Chimpanzees are a close biological relation to humans, and it’s important to be able to understand our sin of wrath. I thought that a chimp would help the viewer understand their own place within the sin.
The mouth is open and the teeth are dominant. It’s threatening, angry. Wrathful. One of the most interesting aspects of wrath is that it is very overpowering. If you’re feeling lazy, embracing your inner sloth, you can imagine doing other things, being active. You don’t do it, but you can imagine it.
But when you’re angry, really angry, everything else seems to either fade away or feed into your wrath. That’s why the landscape in this painting is smooth, relative to the other paintings. All of the crevices and crannies fade away, it’s all about the wrath.
The storm clouds completely envelope the sky, there is no sky, just clouds. It’s the only painting in the series like that. Again, it represents that envelopment, the overwhelmingness of wrath. The darkest of the clouds are aligned with the eyes, the windows of the soul.
Q: Why is the face in sunlight?
A: It represents the possibility of seeing your way clear of the wrath. There is an alternative out there, if you can see and understand your wrath. We all have our hot button issues, the things that make us unreasonably angry. And we often embrace the sin of wrath as justified, even though we are often responsible for creating the situation ourselves.
I think if we shine a light on this sin, understand our own triggers, if you will, understand our own wrath, we can better account for it. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who feel that wrath is the right thing, but I’d like to believe that rarely in North America are we in situations that fully deserve our wrath. What we get angry about are often the wrong things, perceived slights and disrespect. We don’t start frothing at the mouth over people starving to death half a world away, we do it when our coffee isn’t hot enough or when Goggle changes its homepage.
I believe that if we truly start to understand wrath, we can see that the sin may not be in the feeling, but in why its triggered by things that shouldn’t bring about wrath. If we can account for and control our wrath, focus it, we might then be able to effect real global change for the better.
A: Thank you.
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